android 4.1

If you have to have the latest and greatest Android OS and own an HTC One X you can install Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on your HTC One X. There are some great features that have been added with Android 4.1 on the One X like the improved notification bar, offline voice recognition, updated Google search and performance improvements due to Google’s new “Project Butter”. Its all around a smoother Android experience.

The big question is should I get the Google Nexus 7 or the Amazon Kindle Fire? Both are low cost 7 inch tablet and both are big names in the industry geared towards content like reading books, magazines, watching movies and listening to music. Amazon easily has a head start being the first of its kind to the market and having a years worth of publicity and sales under its belt. Both having price point of around $199 which one should you choose?

With the android world a'buzz with Jelly Bean news after its announcement on Wednesday, people are wanting to know what's new with it. We gave you a full run-down a couple days ago, but now we're finding out some specifics, and there's something else that wasn't mentioned in the keynote: a new permission.

After upgrading my Galaxy Nexus (GSM) to Jelly Bean last night (I know, I know, I'm a few days late), I unlocked its bootloader (the usual fastboot oem unlock) and commenced rooting, which I thought would only take a minute or two. However, after almost 2 hours of pushing, flashing, rebooting, and trying no less than 5 different root methods, I still didn't have root. Something must have changed under the hood, and no root method I was trying was working (even PaulOBrien's SuperBoot).

The new version of Android is out, it's real, and yours truly has a (mostly) working copy.

The title may not rhyme anymore, but it's still home to the most in-depth look at the next version of Android on the internet. That's right, the world's most OCD changelog is here to point out every polished pixel of Android 4.1: Jelly Bean.

The usual GTKA caveats apply: This is beta code (the Jelly Bean preview from I/O, in fact) and subject to change. Plus I've got it running on a phone it isn't even meant to run on, so we won't be too hard on it. The good news is we aren't messing around with emulators this time. These are real screenshots from a real phone.

In November, Adobe announced that it would be discontinuing its development of Flash for Android, and it looks like that day has finally arrived.
In a post on their blog, the company has explained that devices which have been certified to run Flash will still continue to do so, and updates will be made available just for those devices. Any devices that have not been certified to run Flash will be unable to install or update it from the Play Store from August 15th.

Another major enhancement we've just learned about with the announcement of Jelly Bean is called Project Butter. Butter (so named likely due to the colloquialism "smooth as butter") represents a new, more efficient processing framework for Android's latest and greatest iteration, making the OS much faster (allowing animation up to 60fps). Android 4.1 also makes apps more responsive, reducing touch latency and "anticipating where your finger will be at the time of screen refresh."

"How is such an enhancement possible?" I can almost hear you wondering. Take it from the Android developer site:

It's kind of a tradition now for the Android team to create different boot animations for every Android release, and Jelly Bean is definitely no exception. Here's the boot animation from the Nexus 7 which is, as you all should know by now, the first device running Android 4.1: